Opera 10.5 Official Alpha release (link at the bottom) is scheduled for 22nd December and here we are with the leaked pre-alpha. Is here

What’s New?

1. It’s Faster: The Speed difference can be felt easily. In benchmarks, it’s alot faster than Firefox and matches that of Chrome. Javascript-heavy pages are still not-as-fast as Chrome.

The faster rendering secret is the newer rendering engine (Presto 2.5.18). However, the long anticipated Carakan (Opera’s upcoming JavaScript execution engine) is still awaited. (We hope to see that in the Official release)

The New Opera 10.5 has more Windows 7 like Glass interface. (click for enlarged view)

3. Full Windows 7 IntegrationOpera 10.5 takes full advantage of Windows 7’s Superbar. By default, the jump list displays your Speed Dial pages. What’s more is that you can pin pages as well, though right now it only works with Speed Dial items — so pinning isn’t all that useful just yet.

Per-tab thumbnails, on the other hand, work beautifully.

4. Per-tab private browsing: It’s pretty similar to what we’ve seen with other browsers: browsing and download history are not saved. Everything which happened in the tab is forgotten about as soon as you close it. One big plus is that you don’t need to open an additional window, making Opera’s implementation just a little bit more inconspicuous.

This build does seem to be missing the one thing I really wanted to test in version 10.5: the new Javascript engine. As I mentioned before, though, this isn’t an official release – so there’s still a chance the real deal from Opera will include Carakan when it debuts next week.